• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.6
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• pp.111-117
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• 2007

This paper presents a novel approach to speech enhancement based on a complex Laplacian probability density function (pdf). With a use of goodness-of-fit (GOF) test we show that the complex Laplacian pdf is more suitable to describe the conventional Gaussian pdf. The likelihood ratio (LR) is applied to derive the speech absence probability in the speech enhancement algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by the objective test and yields better results compared with the conventional Gaussian pdf-based scheme.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.64-69
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a single-channel speech enhancement method based on restoration of both spectral amplitudes and phases for PTT (Push-To-Talk) communication. The proposed method combines the spectral amplitude and phase enhancement to provide high-quality speech unlike other single-channel speech enhancement methods which only use spectral amplitudes. We carried out side-by-side comparison experiment in various non-stationary noise environments in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides high quality speech better than other methods under different noise conditions.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.2287-2312
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• 2018

Extracting key visual information from images containing natural scene is a challenging task and an important step for the visually impaired to recognize information based on tactile graphics. In this study, a novel method is proposed for extracting salient regions based on global contrast enhancement and saliency cuts in order to improve the process of recognizing images for the visually impaired. To accomplish this, an image enhancement technique is applied to natural scene images, and a saliency map is acquired to measure the color contrast of homogeneous regions against other areas of the image. The saliency maps also help automatic salient region extraction, referred to as saliency cuts, and assist in obtaining a binary mask of high quality. Finally, outer boundaries and inner edges are detected in images with natural scene to identify edges that are visually significant. Experimental results indicate that the method we propose in this paper extracts salient objects effectively and achieves remarkable performance compared to conventional methods. Our method offers benefits in extracting salient objects and generating simple but important edges from images containing natural scene and for providing information to the visually impaired.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.8
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• pp.1236-1247
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• 2016

Recently, the level set has become a popular method in many research fields. The main reason is that it can be modified into many variants. One such case is our proposed method. We describe a contrast-enhancement method to segment the hippocampal region from the background. However, the hippocampus region has quite similar intensities to the neighboring pixel intensities. In addition, to handle the inhomogeneous intensities of the hippocampus, we used a bias correction before hippocampal segmentation. Thus, we developed a contrast-enhanced bias-corrected distance-regularized level set (CBDLS) to segment the hippocampus in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It shows better performance than the distance-regularized level set evolution (DLS) and bias-corrected distance-regularized level set (BDLS) methods in 33 MRI images of one normal patient. Segmentation after contrast enhancement and bias correction can be done more accurately than segmentation while not using a bias-correction method and without contrast enhancement.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.111-115
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• 2017

Terahertz waves are superior to conventional X-ray or Magnetic Resonance Tomography(MRI), and the amount of information that can be transmitted is as large as thousands of times that conventional X-ray or MRI. In addition, Terahertz waves have great performance in analyzing an object which have some layered structure. By using this advantage, we can extract the letters of a page by analyzing information such as absorption amount and reflection amount by irradiating a closed book with pulses of various frequencies within gap of a terahertz wave. However, in the image of each page using the Terahertz wave might be obtained various kinds of noise and the different character occlusion region. So, to extract letters from the terahertz image, we must take the noise and occlusion region away. We have been working to enhancement the image quality in various ways, and keep on studying de-noising processing for enhancement about the image quality and high resolution. Finally, we also keep on studying about OCR(Optical Character Recognition) technology, which based on pattern matching technique, to read letters.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.61-69
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• 2007

This paper proposes new preprocessing algorithm to extract minutiae in the process of fingerprint recognition. Fingerprint images quality enhancement is a topic phase to ensure good performance in a topic phase to ensure good performance in a Automatic Fingerprint Identification System(AFIS) based on minutiae matching. This paper proposes an algorithm to improve fingerprint image preprocessing to extract minutiae accurately based on directional filter. We improved the suitability of low quality fingerprint images to better suit fingerprint recognition by using valid ridge vector and ridge probability of fingerprint images. With the proposed fingerprint improvement algorithm, noise is removed and presumed ridges are more clearly ascertained. The algorithm is based on five step: computation of effective ridge vector, computation of ridge probability, noise reduction, ridge emphasis, and orientation compensation and frequency estimation. The performance of the proposed approach has been evaluated on two set of images: the first one is self collected using a capacitive semiconductor sensor and second one is DB3 database from Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC).

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.227-234
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• 2020

In this paper, we propose wav-U-Net to improve speech enhancement in heavy noisy environments, and it has implemented three principal techniques. First, as input data, we use 128 modified Mel-scale filter banks which can reduce computational burden instead of 512 frequency bins. Mel-scale aims to mimic the non-linear human ear perception of sound by being more discriminative at lower frequencies and less discriminative at higher frequencies. Therefore, Mel-scale is the suitable feature considering both performance and computing power because our proposed network focuses on speech signals. Second, we add a simple ResNet as pre-processing that helps our proposed network make estimated speech signals clear and suppress high-frequency noises. Finally, the proposed U-Net model shows significant performance regardless of the kinds of noise. Especially, despite using a single channel, we confirmed that it can well deal with non-stationary noises whose frequency properties are dynamically changed, and it is possible to estimate speech signals from noisy speech signals even in extremely noisy environments where noises are much lauder than speech (less than SNR 0dB). The performance on our proposed wav-U-Net was improved by about 200% on SDR and 460% on NSDR compared to the conventional Jansson's wav-U-Net. Also, it was confirmed that the processing time of out wav-U-Net with 128 modified Mel-scale filter banks was about 2.7 times faster than the common wav-U-Net with 512 frequency bins as input values.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.43-51
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose an algorithm that improves a tone quality of a noisy audio signal in order to enhance a Performance of perceptual filter using noise energy control. Most of the algorithms which were proposed by the other researchers usually applied a filter using the noise energy acquired from a silent range. In this case. the improvement rate of tone quality decreases if the noise energy is changed by the magnitude or environment variation in a signal frame. But the Proposed method Provides the means to find a food estimated noise through energy control of the estimated noise which is obtained from a silent range. Also we can get the enhancement of tone qualify in low frequency band unlike other methods. To show the performance of the Proposed algorithm, various input signals which had a different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) such as 5dB, l0dB, 15dB and 20dB were used to test the proposed algorithm. With the proposed algorithm, we could confirm the enhancement of tone quality in terms of segmental SNR (SSNR). noise-to-mask ration (NMR) and mean opinion score (MOS) test.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.619-627
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• 2015

This paper presents a speech enhancement method using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). In the training phase, each basis matrix of source signal is obtained from a proper database, and these basis matrices are utilized for the source separation. In this case, the performance of speech enhancement relies heavily on the basis matrix. The proposed method for which speech basis matrix is made a high reconstruction error for noise signal shows a better performance than the standard NMF which basis matrix is trained independently. For comparison, we propose another method, and evaluate one of previous method. In the experiment result, the performance is evaluated by perceptual evaluation speech quality and signal to distortion ratio, and the proposed method outperformed the other methods.

• Proceedings of the SAREK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.124-129
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• 2008

The objectives of this paper are to examine the effect of nano-particles on the pool type absorption heat transfer enhancement and to find the optimal conditions to design a highly effective compact absorber for $NH_3/H_2O$ absorption system. The effect of $Al_2O_3$ and CNT particles on the absorption performance is studied experimentally. The experimental ranges of the key parameters are 20% of $NH_3$ concentration, $0{\sim}0.08%$ (volume fraction) of CNT particles, and $0{\sim}0.06%$ (volume fraction) of $Al_2O_3$ nano-particles. For the $NH_3/H_2O$ nanofluids, the heat transfer rate and absorption rate with 0.02 vol% $Al_2O_3$ nano-particles were found to be 28.9% and 17.8% higher than those without nano-particles, respectively. It is recommended that the concentration of 0.02 vol% of $Al_2O_3$ nano-particles be the best candidate for $NH_3/H_2O$ absorption performance enhancement.